what paint there was left rose in blisters, and
scaled off: and sometimes the rain poured
down upon it, and we got under it,—Jos and
I, and the baby. We liked to be there, snug
on the dry sand, when the rain did not last
too long. We liked to hear the rain pelt over
our heads; and it was a better shelter than the
cottage, because the thatch there was so bad
that the rain was always coming through. The
smell there was so bad, too! The thatch was
worse than all others put together. It rotted,
and dropped in pieces, sometimes in the house,
and sometimes outside; and the bits that
were not full of vermin were mouldy, and
sickening to come near. So Jos and I liked
the boat, and were glad it was now never
stirred; though my mother cried sometimes
when she looked at it, and said we were
little fools to sit laughing there, when no
bread came out of the boat any more.

After a time, the boat came to be used again;
but never at hours when I could help to push
it off. Jos and I used to find it wet in the
morning; and my mother said it had been out
trading. She did not bid us be secret about
this trading; because we knew nobody except
the children belonging to four or five other
cottages, like our own; and the families who
lived there traded too. I doubt whether the
grown people knew that there was anything
wrong about their way of trading; and I am
sure the children did not. My mother took
me to sleep with her, and put the goods under
the sail, which was still Jos's bed. Jos's bed
looked all the handsomer for being raised by
the packages beneath it; but he did not like
it so well; and when our hut was very full of
goods, used to steal out, and sleep on the sand,
under the boat.

It is best to speak plainly, I think, that
there may be no secret about how some
people live. The truth, then, is, that I was
never, really never, in a state of bodily ease,
owing to the dirt in which we lived. I did
not know this at the time. I first became
aware of it in after years, when those changes
had occurred which caused me to become
clean in my person. I am now quite sure
that there never was an hour of my childhood
in which my skin was not irritated so
as to make me more or less cross, or restless,
or low-spirited; and this was not the worst.
If I had not headache, or some distinct pain
somewhere within my body (which was very
often the case), I was always suffering from a
feeling of heaviness, or weakness, or of
indistinct uneasiness of my whole frame—
miserable feelings which I now know to belong to
an unwholesome state of the skin. It seems
to me now, that Jos and I were never really
clean. We often dabbled in the sea-water,
up to the knees and elbows; but this only
made the salt stick upon the fish oil that had
covered our skins first, and made its way
into every pore. Our clothes were fishy;
our hair was fishy, rough and tangled; our
eyes smarted with the salt that seemed to
gather upon us from the air and the earth, as
well as the water. My breath felt hot; my
sleep was troubled: though sometimes
grievously wanting food, I seldom relished what
I ate; and it was seldom that I felt light
and gay. I suppose it was because everybody
about us felt the same, from living in
the same way, that nobody complained. In
our little hamlet, there was no cottage where
the floor was clean, and the building
wholesome; where the clothes were washed with
soap, or people's skin knew the comfort of
soft water, and of being made pure, and
flexible, and comfortable, by its pores being
open, and the circulation of the blood free
and easy. If any one household had been in
this happy natural state of health, others
might have learned the lesson; and I have in
my own mind no doubt that they might have
enjoyed an amount of ease and good spirits,
and cheerfulness of temper, which would have
been of more consequence to their happiness
than money, or any of the good luck that they
complained of the want of. They used to sit
on the half-putrid sands, the women as well
as the men drinking spirits because they felt
weak and low, and saying that there was no
use in catching fish when there was nobody
to buy it. That there was no market for
their fish was, they felt, a hardship.

Almost the only customers we had had for
fish, for a longer time than I could remember,
were the French prisoners at the barracks on
the moor. It was only the cheapest sorts of
fish that they wanted; but they took enough
to give Jos and me many a walk to the
barracks. In the pilchard-season, my mother
went with us sometimes; pilchards were so
cheap, and the poor fellows wanted so many
more than we children could carry. When
we carried fresh mackarel, they used to be on
the watch at the rails, and beckon, and call,
and make signs so eagerly, that it was droll
to see. They were very knowing, too, about
whitings and haddocks; but the red herrings
were the wonder to us. I never knew any
people care so much for red herrings; and
surely no other people in England made red
herrings go so far. Instead of eating their
allowance of bread as people usually do, they
used to make it into soup. Or, if they could
get a little pearl-barley or barley-meal, they
would stew and stew it, till the water really
looked as thick as soup; and then they would
make balls or little dumplings of their bread,
crumbled with some morsels of red herring,
minced as fine as pins' heads; and when these
were set swimming in the soup, the poor
fellows used to look as satisfied as if a piece
of roast beef was before them. Now and
then I stood to see them eat their dinner, and
I dare say there might be some wonder in my
face, or perhaps I was munching a piece of
dry bread, at the time; for they used to
smile at me, and lay their hands on their
stomachs with a pleased look, to make me
understand that their soup had done them